A New Rallying Cry for Prairie State GOP–Fix Illinois
December 1, 2022
By Ray LaHood and Jim Nowlan
The Illinois Republican Party is dead in the water. The GOP counts only three of 17 members of Congress from the state; one-third of the state’s legislators; no state officers, for years; a 5-2 partisan Democrat majority of the state supreme court; an invisible state party organization with no money, and no idea what it stands for.
Spending hundreds of millions of inherited money, Gov. J.B. Pritzker bought the governorship in 2018, and again in 2022. Worse, he spent scores of millions this year to nominate a fail-safe opponent in the Illinois GOP primary, a man viewed by the critical suburbanite vote as a country hick. The ploy was an unforgivable abuse of the democratic process. And still, Pritzker won only 54 percent of the vote.
Contrary to Pritzker’s millions to paint Illinois as a wonderland, the state is hurting. Since 1970, Illinois has lost 2 million whites, and from 2010-2020, Illinois joined Mississippi and West Virginia as the only states to lose population. For years, job growth has been slower than for the nation, as well as for the rest of the Midwest. CEO Magazine says Illinois has the 48th worst business climate among the states.
Even with about $52 billion in federal pandemic money to the state and its local governments (nobody knows the actual amount), the governor’s own budget office shows the state will be back to its old deficit spending in just two years.
Our state’s social service delivery is a disaster, if the state’s care of our children is an indicator. For 30 years Illinois has been under a federal consent decree to improve the department of children and family services. Embarrassing. This year a judge in Chicago has repeatedly charged the department head with contempt for failing to take appropriate care of children in our care.
The Party of Lincoln can revitalize its fortunes by taking the job of fixing Illinois to the voters, a majority of whom think the state is headed in the wrong direction. Below is a medley of policy initiatives that should be among those considered by Party leaders, maybe via legislator-public member task forces.
* School choice for parents and children through open enrollment. Let children attend the school of their choice. Iowa has done it for decades, and it works. Seven percent of Iowa’s kids attend a school other than in their own school district. A musically inclined student can go to a nearby school with a great music program; a mom from Cedar Rapids can drive with her daughter each morning to work in Iowa City, and to a school near work. School aid follows the child. Sending schools feel the pressure to do better, to keep their students, and their funding. Competition is great.
* Start-up Free Zones. Cities could seek designation as such, where a start up business is free from all state and local taxes for up to 10 years, while showing progress. Cities could apply tax increment financing funds to early-stage investments in start-ups.
* “A Degree in Three.” Because of state underfunding of its public colleges, tuition skyrocketed in Illinois in the past two decades. Today, nearly half of all high school graduates who go to college do so in another state, where the cost is less; in 2002, it was less than 30 percent. Talk about brain drain. We propose that community and four-year colleges collaborate to provide a bachelor’s degree in three years, including summer school, with some online education, at the equivalent of low community college tuition. The one year or so after community college could be in a bare-bones setting, thus less expensive, at one of our public 4-year universities that has half the enrollment it had two decades ago.
* A new “Research Triangle.” The University of Chicago, Northwestern and the University of Illinois (at both Urbana-Champaign and Chicago) are three among the absolute best graduate research centers on the globe. For example, UIUC for several recent years running received more competitive grant funding from the National Science Foundation than any campus, private or public, in the nation! There is an old saying that inter-institutional cooperation in higher education is an unnatural act among unwilling participants–yet times are changing, as the best scientists want to collaborate with the best scientists, wherever they are. So, knock some heads together to tell the world that this research triangle is at work together, turning out cutting edge technology, ripe for commercialization.
* Pay-as-you-go pension funding. Illinois is spending billions more than necessary to fulfill pension obligations to public employee retirees, and it has put our budget in the hole persistently. This is so because the state is also trying to build back a nest egg of assets to fund pensions, which it will never accomplish. Since 2011, pension benefits have been ratcheted back for new employees, and in a few years the “pig” of earlier, rich pensions will be through the “python” of pension obligations. This could save about $2 billion a year in annual appropriations today.
* Illinois needs a new constitution. The 1970 charter has failed, in large part as a result of highly partisan interpretations by the state’s high court, which has had a Democratic majority continuously since 1962. For example, term limits and independent mapping have repeatedly been shot down, to protect the Cook County Democratic Party. In 2028, not that far away, the present charter requires that voters be asked if they would like a new state constitutional convention–and there is nothing the Democratic Party can do to stop the vote. A friend of ours worries that the product of a new convention might create a situation worse than at present. Worse?
* Challenge the 2020 gerrymandering of state legislative districts in state courts. The Illinois Constitution calls in two places for “compact districts,” yet the 2020 districts emanating from Chicago look like strings, or at best arthritic fingers, grasping out into the suburbs. If the partisan court were to declare black is white, that is the stringy districts are compact, such would simply show for all the world that protestations of independence by the new state high court chief justice are but more cockamamie.
* “The Great Railroad Workaround.” Illinois is the rail hub of the nation. Half of all intermodal freight traffic passes through Chicagoland–and it is choking Chicago, and threatening our state’s rail leadership. Solution: Loop much of the RR freight traffic around, rather than through, Chicago. There are already switching yards west of Chicagoland, in the Ronald Reagan
Corridor, to serve as a model. This will be a really heavy lift, yet Daniel Burnhan saw Chicago leaders who “make no little plans.”
* No more toll roads. Suburbanites pay not only one of the highest gas taxes in the nation, but also hefty tolls daily to get to work on our network of toll roads. We have to pay off the bonds already sold, but we can stop there. Future construction would be paid for, as in many states, solely by the gas tax. If and when EVs become the norm, we may have to shift completely to user fees such as tolls–but one or the other, not both.
So, some platform planks to chew on, constructive we hope. There may be better ones. Let’s have them. The point is that we must focus on opportunities for our citizens to achieve and create.
Social issues such as abortion and guns are emotion-charged and very important. Republicans and independent voters all have varied perspectives on these issues. Republicans as individuals should advocate their respective passions on these issues, yet they are not fundamental to the future vitality of our state, and should no longer define our Party.
Thus, the 6 percent solution. Illinois statewide elections turn out to be about 55-45 Democratic. If just 6 percent of voters shifted from D to R, Illinois would become a Republican state. If Illinois Republicans can’t, over the coming three, 2-year election cycles, take a pro-opportunity platform and move 6 percent of voters, then maybe we should do as our neighbors have been doing, and move ourselves out of the state.
LaHood was a Republican member of the U.S. House from 1995 to 2009 and Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation from 2009-2013. Nowlan is a former Republican state legislator, statewide candidate, and running mate with Gov. Richard B. Ogilvie in 1972. Both live in central Illinois.
